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Book Project – Web Server Applications

Once again, I’m working with a co-author, Karen Anewalt on a book project. It’s a text-book with working title “A Practical Introduction to Web Server Applications.” A book for students who want to know how to set up and use a Web server to provide applications on the Web. It deals almost entirely with tools, methods, techniques, and concepts on the server-side of any Web presence. As we write it we’re using it in a course we’re teaching this semester. I teach one section, and Karen teaches another.

This will be the seventh book project I’ve worked on with others. You can see a list of many of the books I’ve done at amazon.com. I’ve also done few on my own, and they are also listed at amazon, or you can see a list on my home page.

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2004 01 29 ernie Books Comments (0) Permalink

End of the Semester

Th end of another semester! It is always sweet and a big emotional relief. I had my last classes, CPSC 104 and CPSC 470M, today. I really enjoyed the classes this semester, for some some reason more than other semesters. Lots of fun and work this semester and I’m glad it’s over!!!!

2003 12 04 ernie Teaching Comments (0) Permalink

Identity Theft – investigation and fake-ids

I was reading a portion of Identity Theft by John R. Vacca.

The book is nicely done with straightforward information and it is well organized. One of the sections of the book described some relatively easy ways to find information about someone and also mentioned some sites where you can get fake or ‘novelty’ ids. Naturally, since the book is in printed form, some of the sites and URLs were no longer valid. This seems to be particularly true in the case of sites that sold ids. But, when you consider that some of their activies can be construed as being illegal, it’s not surprising.

Software to helo you find out about others:

Links to sites dealing with fake ids:

There are lots of other sites available. The software was 29.95 and the fake ids range in price from $75 to $200. I suppose you get what you pay for.

** Comments ** – April 24, 2006
Comments submitted by “dude in CO”.

Any Fake/Novelty ID website listed on Underground-review.com is a complete fraud, all ran by the same person. Phonyid.com is also another fraud. Check out ripoffreport.com before getting ripped off.

2003 08 20 ernie Books
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A Shortcut Through Time

I found the book “A Shortcut Through Time” By George Johnson, published by Alfred A Knopf, 2003, ISBN 0-375-41193-3 on the recent additions shelf of the Central Rappahannock Regional Library.

It was the subtitle, “The Path to the Quantum Computer”, that really got me interested. I teach computer science at Mary Washington College and I didn’t know the first thing about quantum computing before reading this book. Now I feel like I know something! Johnson’s explanations are clear and to the point. They really made sense to me given my background in mathematics and the fact that I’ve been teaching computer science for lots of years. I’d recommend this book to anyone with an interest in science and with the ability to follow a technical discussion in general terms. He does an excellent job of exposition of a subtle and difficult subject. He states in the preface that “science writing involves spinning an illusion.” The illusion is that the material came to be understood in a straight forward manner, and so it is easy for the reader to grasp and comprehend. It’s not very easy to do that when discussing quantum mechanics and quantum computing, but George Johnson does a very good job at it. Read this book!

“A Quantum Leap in Cryptography” appeared in on July 15, 2003 in Business Week Online.

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2003 07 14 ernie Books Comments (0) Permalink

Chard Omelet

I started making this recipe last year after our trip to France. The recipe is from Lulu’s Provencal Table, by Richard Olney, Harper Collins, 1994, ISBN 0-06-016922-2. It seems that a new edition by Olney is the one available at Amazon.com.

This is an example of what the author calls a “flat omelette.” It is a collection of vegetables first fried, then mixed with eggs, and all fried together. The recipe calls for only garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper, chard, and eggs. I add another vegetable. So far I’ve tried fresh corn and baby summer squash. I also add some cheese – a soft or semi-soft goat or sheep cheese. One more thing – I also add some chopped herbs, and tonight Lynn made some pesto to have with it. We’ve had this for lunch or supper.

The recipe starts on page 92.
Ingredients:
3 eggs
Salt & pepper
7 tablespoons olive oil
6 garlic cloves, crushed peeled,and finely chopped
1 pound of chard greens (without ribs), parboiled for a few seconds, drained and refreshed beneath cold running water, squeezed thoroughly, and chopped.
1/2 cup of fresh corn or summer squash
1/4 cup of soft or semi-soft goat or sheep cheese
fresh herbs – rosemary, thyme, oregano, fennel – chopped

Method:
Break the eggs into a mixing bowl, and add salt and pepper.
Heat the 3 tablespoons of the olive oil in a large heavy frying pan over high heat. Add the garlic and let it sizzle for 2 or 3 seconds. Add the chard and other vegetable and saute for several minutes, shaking the pan and tossing repeatedly.
Whisk the eggs with a fork and then add the contents of the frying pan to the eggs, and stir until all is a uniform mixture.

Heat 3 tablespoons of oil in a clean pan – use the same one if it’s clean, and add the omelette mixture making sure to spread it evenly with a fork but be sure not to touch the pan with the fork. This helps avoid sticking. Add dollops of the cheese into the omelette. Cover the pan and lower the heat, and cook for several minutes until the body of the pan has noticeably thickened. Then remove the cover, put a flat plate on the pan and turn it upside down. The omelette should come out of the pan very easily. Be careful of any hot oil! Add another tablespoon of oil, if necessary, to the pan, flip the omelette from the plate to the pan and cook a minute or so.

Slide the omelette from the pan to a platter. If it doesn’t come out easily then cut it into 2 to 4 large pieces and arrange them on a plate. Sprinkle all with the chopped herbs and enjoy.

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2003 07 09 ernie Recipes Comments (0) Permalink

Sauteed Asparagus with Curried Tofu and Tomatoes

I was looking for tofu cookbooks at the Central Rappahannock regional Library, and came across This Can’t be Tofu!, by Deborah Madison, ISBN 0-7679-0419-2.

I’ve tried 2 recipes and they both have been very good. This one for asparagus and curried tofu is on page 66, and I think it’s pictured on the cover.

Ingredients:
1 carton firm tofu
Salt & freshly ground black pepper
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon curry powder
1/4 teaspoon turmeric
2 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons oil
4 garlic cloves, finely chopped
2 teaspoons roasted ground cumin seed
1 onion finely diced
1/2 pound slender asparagus, tough ends removed, cur diagonally into 3-inch lengths
Several pinches red pepper flakes
4 Roma tomatoes, seeded & chopped
3 tablespoons chopped cilantro

Instructions:
1. Dice the tofu into pieces about the size of a sugar cube. Simmer in 6 cups of salted water for 2 minutes, then remove with a strainer and pace on paper towels. Wick the surface with another paper towel, then toss the cubes with 1/2 teaspoon salt, some pepper, the sugar, the turmeric, and curry powder.

2. Heat the 2 tablespoons oil in a wide skillet ot wok, add the tofu, and saute over medium-high heat until golden, but still tender, about 10 minutes in all. Turn the tofu so that all the surfaces are colored. Remove to a plate, cover to keep warm, and return the pan to the heat and adjust the heat to medium.

3. Add the 2 teaspoons oil. When hot, add the garlic, 1 1/2 teaspoons of the cumin, and the onion. Cook until the onion is translucent, then raise the heat to high. As soon as the pan feels hot, add the asparagus, pepper flakes, and a pinch of two of salt. Saute just until the asparagus is bright green and tender, but not limp, about 5 minutes or so, the exact time depending on the size. Add the tomatoes and tofu, and cook about 1 minute more. Turn off the heat and add the cilantro and remaining cumin.

Presentation:
Slide everything onto a platter (use a bright blue one if you can) and serve immediately.

Notes:
We’ve used any sorts of tomatoes. For example, the last time we made it we used two medium tomatoes. Also, we don’t do much about removing seeds, but do get rid of some of them if it’s convenient.

The author says you can use green beans if asparagus isn’t available. We haven’t tried that.

Serving immediately sounds good but we brought this to a pot-luck party, and it was as as good, IMO, as being freshly prepared.

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2003 07 06 ernie Recipes Comments (0) Permalink

Tom’s Hardware

I noticed today that HP is offering a choice of Windows XP or Mandrake Linux 9.1 on some of its business systems. There are some options for configuration and the various models come with a Celeron or Pentium processor.

I wanted to know more about the features or workings of the Pentium chip and Googled “advanced transfer cache.” The first result was a page at the site Tom’s Hardware Guide. Reviews of hardware are the featured content. The reviews focus on the technical aspects and often include illustrations, photographs, and charts. The site claims the reviews are “independent editorial reviews of cutting-edge computer hardware.” The site also features annotated press releases in “Tom’s Hard News“, a weekly newsletter “Tom’s Hard News“, and a bulletin board titled, very appropriately IMO, “Tom’s Hardware Guide Community.”

The site has been around since 1996 and I wonder why I’ve never come across it before. I was originally attracted by the content. That’s why I decided to write about it, but I’m also impressed with the site’s structure and purpose.

2003 07 03 ernie Interesting Web Sites Comments (0) Permalink

Buying Train Tickets for France

We’re going to France this summer and we were thinking about buying a France Saver Pass for train travel. Since we need to get from Paris to Cassis at a particular time on a specific day we wanted to make a reservation. We could get time table information at voyages-sncf.com

I posted some questions about this in misc.transport.rail.europe and rec.travel.europe and got lots of useful advice. A very useful piece of advice was to research the topic at the Usenet archive at Google.

For what I thought would be the most authoritative answer I wrote to information at sncf.com and received “I inform you that it is impossible to book a seat on our web site when you have a train pass.”
The message also contained an incorrect phone number for the English-speaking Call Centre. The number they supplied took me to an agent, but not an english-speaking agent. She courteously gave me the current number.

I ended up calling
SNCF English-speaking Call Centre – 33 8 92 35 35 39
Dialing 011 first from the US, made a reservation and purchased tickets. the tickets will be sent to me in the US and should arrive in 10 days.

We decided not to purchase the France Saver Pass. It seems to me that we can get the tickets we need and travel as we wish more cheaply than purchasing the France Saver Pass.

Originally posted May 2002

2003 07 02 ernie Travel Comments (0) Permalink

World of Science

I got to visit a site that once again made me feel that great excitement of finding an excellent resource on the Web.

The site is Wolfram’s Research World of Science http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/.
It’s clean, easy to use, and has lots of depth. The main categories are mathematics, physics, astronomy, chemistry, and biography.

Not sure why none of the life sciences are listed and why biography is there. The self-description of the site pretty much identifies this as an encyclopedia put together by one person : “This resource has been assembled over more than a decade by internet encyclopedist Eric W. Weisstein with assistance from the internet community.” – About Eric Weisstein’s World of Science

It’s a great site and visit it when you get the chance.

Originally posted September 2002

2003 07 02 ernie Interesting Web Sites Comments (0) Permalink

Web services with no fee

This started out by looking at what was available at Google labs. That’s a place where Google shows off some items it’s thinking of rolling out for public use. Today they included Google Compute, Google Viewer, Google Webquotes, Google Glossary, Google Sets, Voice Search, and Keyboard Shortcuts. Some of these have been around since May of 2002. I was looking at Google viewer. It gives a preview of each item in the list of search results. You can scroll through them. It was helpful, but my screen flickered a lot each time a new page was brought into view. I used the search expression Web server applications, since Karen Anewalt and I are starting work on a book on that topic.

The site I spent some time looking at was server.com. It offers a variety of applications at no fee with advertisements or for a monthly leasing fee. The applications include DiscussionApp a threaded message board with integrated mailing list and RSS syndication, ListApp a mailing list manager, DBApp a database application, CalendarApp, and NewsApp a news aggregator. I tried ListApp. It was very easy to set up and modify through a control panel they provide. When a user subscribes or gets email there’s an advertisement and a line of text that really annoys me. “Get rid of the ads- lease this WebApp for as little as $5 a month.” It’s annoying because it’s stronger than an advertisement, it tells the others using the service that the provider isn’t paying for it. It might also encourage individuals to subscribe. It seems that messages posted to the subscriber list are sent out once per day, at midnight. Still, it’s a pretty good service. At the basic level it’s free, you concentrate on dealing with what individual users see (third tier), and they maintain the server. Of course that last item is the point of our book. Once the server is set up correctly installing applications like these aren’t very difficult.

2003 07 01 ernie About the Internet and the Web
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